1 Mark Exin

Exin — now Kcynia in west-central Poland — was a small Prussian market town of perhaps three thousand inhabitants when the First World War broke out. Like dozens of similar municipalities across the German Reich in late 1914, the Stadtkasse issued its own emergency paper in response to an immediate and practical problem: the hoarding of metal coinage had stripped daily commerce of its small-change infrastructure within weeks of mobilization. These municipal notes, collectively known as Notgeld, had no legal tender status beyond the issuing locality and no formal banking backstop.

The DeNG 11 catalog places this among the earliest documented 1914 issues from the Posen province. Small-town Notgeld from this first wave is considerably harder to find than the decorative issues of 1920–21, which were produced in quantity specifically for collectors.